Would switching from GitLab to something like Gitea/Gogs cut down on those costs? The GitLab system requirements start at multiple gigabytes of RAM and CPU cores for almost idle installations whereas a small Gitea I'm running takes <100MB RAM and next to zero CPU. Most people I know that self-host (i.e. privately, not commercially) a git server with issue tracker don't run GitLab due to the resource hogging. But I don't know how it scales when you put more load on Gitea vs the same load on GitLab -- does anyone have experience with that?